Featured Customer File #5

Located in Tacoma, WA, AustinCina Architects maintains a diverse and impressive portfolio which includes commercial, church, and residential projects.

The Situation

AustinCina's first website was developed several years ago. The original site was created by an outside web-developer, and although the site met the original design goals, it leveraged static navigation and content throughout the site. Like most small and medium-sized organizations, AustinCina did not have a web-editor on staff to maintain the site, and in time, much of the content became outdated and irrelevant. Projects could not be added or removed without also restructuring the graphical menu system each time a modification was made.

Solution Highlights

The primary goal was to get the site current and provide the tools to enable AustinCina to keep it updated. It was particularly important for them to author their own project portfolio. We wanted to minimize the cost where possible, while giving them the functionality they needed. It was also important to develop a framework that is adaptable to AustinCina's future needs.

Solution Highlights:

Re-use existing design: AustinCina was happy with the site's existing appearance. Making use of their existing design allowed BSI to spend less time on the layout and reduce the cost to the customer.

Integrate available content: These updates can now be done by the customer, using the tools ByteSmith developed for them.

Onsite training gave the primary web content manager at AustinCina confidence and ensured a smooth transition.

The required functionality was provided through a user-friendly interface.

Project Portfolio Management:

Templated and custom page layouts allow the client to choose from a standard, data-driven layout or a custom web-page for each project.

Client can now add, edit, and delete projects through an easy to use interface

Project folders for Image and File Sharing are automatically generated when a new project is added.

Architects are associated with their projects allowing easy client review

Additional features:

WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing tools allow the author to update any html page on the site, as well as create new ones.

AustinCina can easily add upcoming events to their web-site; events are automatically removed from display after the user-defined expiration date

AustinCina can now design, publish and email newsletters: The WYSIWYG tools ByteSmith created for AustinCina allow easy generation of both html and pdf versions of their newsletters. Easy publication process combines both publication and email generation in one click.

Smart Security: The content and authoring are segregated so only web authors can modify the site.